https://discourse.nixos.org/t/much-ado-about-nothing/44236
Not directly related to this blog post but from NixOS discourse forum, a tl;dr from another person about the NixOS drama here :
If you’re looking for a TL;DR of the situation, here it is: Nix community had a governance crisis for years. While there has been progress on building explicit teams to govern the project, it continued to fundamentally rely on implicit authority and soft power Eelco Dolstra, as one of the biggest holders of this implicit authority and soft power, has continuously abused this authority to push his decisions, and to block decisions that he doesn’t like Crucially, he also used his implicit authority to block any progress on solving this governance crisis and establishing systems with explicit authority This has led uncountably many people to burn out over the issue, and culminated in writing an open letter to have Eelco resign from all formal positions in the project and take a 6 month break from any involvement in the community Eelco wrote a response that largely dismisses the issues brought up, and advertises his company’s community as a substitute for Nix community
Ok please don’t hang me for this, I’m genuinely curious. Why does it seem like the only people who are upset about NixOS are 1. transgender, and 2. can’t actually pinpoint exact problems, or offer any solutions, but expect other people to magically change somehow?
Is there something I’m missing?
Why are identity politics even allowed to be discussed in an unrelated field (software development) in the first place? Seems it always just leads to people getting upset when you can just not talk about it as it’s really not related at all to my knowledge.
I didn’t see where the author brought up gender in this article.
What makes you think (“identity”) politics are unrelated to software development? Software development is deeply entrenched in politics. It’s just that, just as in most topics that don’t have politics as their main thing, a lot of people would rather pretend it’s not.
Any community of people presupposes politics. If it doesn’t show, most likely it’s a very narrow or homogeneous group of people, which involves excluding/shunning others to defend this narrowness. So that has its own sort of problem too.
What makes you think (“identity”) politics are unrelated to software development?
The fact that the code quality is independent from your “identity” ?
Why are identity politics even allowed to be discussed in an unrelated field (software development) in the first place? Seems it always just leads to people getting upset when you can just not talk about it as it’s really not related at all to my knowledge.
I can kinda agree here. In the open source community, identity politics should be especially irrelevant. The FOSS licences are explicitly designed in a way to not discriminate based on such factors like race, religion, gender, nationality, biological sex, political views, etc.
However, from what I can gleam from the blog, it seems somehow related to the COC, maintainer behavior and a lack of transparency rather than “identity politics”. In what way, idk because the blog doesn’t seem to specify any specific verifiable incident, at least from what I can tell. But I will say, that if it is a matter of the COC, that the COC is supposed to be a protection of the right for an individual to be able to express themselves in an environment that won’t prosecute them.
So, in this regard it’d make sense to if say someone was being miss gendered maliciously for example, it’d violate the COC. In this regard, the right to express oneself doesn’t give someone the right to harass others because they disagree with how someone else is expressing themselves.Edits : restructuring and clarification.